Official FCC Blog

April, 2013

On April 25, the FCC was proud to celebrate International Girls’ in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Day with a Twitter chat focusing on how ICT has helped improve the lives of women and girls in their careers, education, and health.

The purpose of International Girls’ in ICT Day is to promote gender equality in the growing field of information and communication technologies by encouraging school-aged girls to consider a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education or a tech career. Technology plays an increasingly important role in all aspects of our lives.

“ICT is one of the fastest growing job sectors and one of the best paying. The U.S. Bureau of labor statistics estimates a 21.8% growth in ICT jobs in the United States by 2020. At the same time, there is such a big talent gap in ICT that there will only be enough qualified workers to fill one third of those jobs. On the bright side, this situation presents a great economic opportunity for anyone considering a career in ICT.” Excerpt from Opening Statement for International Girls in ICT Day Ambassador Betty E. King

For the 1ST time, an FCC commissioner, Mingnon Clyburn, participated in an FCC-hosted Twitter chat by giving opening remarks:

I am a proud engineer and technologist, but it has not been an easy journey as a woman in a sea of men. Therefore, I am glad that there is a growing global movement to encourage female technical talent. Recent data shows that there is a business imperative to hire more women:

The Technology Transitions Policy Task Force held its first workshop on March 18th. We had many distinguished panelists—many of whom came from far outside the Beltway—and we are very grateful for their time and efforts.

As we had hoped, we learned many significant things from the discussion at the workshop that help us understand the technological transitions that are the focus of this Task Force—from TDM to IP, from copper to fiber, and from wireline to greater use of wireless networks. I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight a few of the key takeaways.

First, we focused on capabilities and limitations of new and emerging technologies. For example, panelists discussed MegaMIMO and its potential for stitching together overlapping wireless cells to increase data speeds for end users. We also reviewed the cable industry’s DOCSIS 3.1 standard and its potential for serving businesses and consumers with speeds up to 1Gbps. The panel also discussed how existing copper wires can provide significantly higher speed services through VDSL2 technology. We also heard more about current trends in business voice and broadband—including the vociferous demand for wireless services among enterprise customers and the fixed-mobile convergence that IP-enabled networks will enable for businesses. At the same time, panelists emphasized that even with these technological evolutions that enable higher speeds over copper, there are limits to the technology, and copper may not be sufficient to meet broadband demand indefinitely. These and other wired and wireless capabilities—and the financial and technical prerequisites for bringing those capacities to consumers—are important for us to keep in mind as we take a hard look at what these technologies mean for Commission policy.

The Commission recently adopted the Second Report and Order on Foreign Ownership (“Order”) to overhaul and streamline the way it reviews foreign ownership of U.S. wireless companies under sections 310(b)(3) and (b)(4) of the Communications Act. These reforms will dramatically reduce the number of hours applicants spend to prepare required filings, as well as lower, by up to 70%, the number of such filings annually.;

This Order is the latest in a series of regulatory reform and data innovation efforts we in the International Bureau have taken under the leadership of Chairman Genachowski. I’d like to take this occasion to highlight these reform accomplishments and to thank the excellent staff in the Bureau and the Commission for their efforts to streamline and improve the way we interact with industry and the public.

A guiding principle of our regulatory reform efforts has been to achieve flexible, common sense, market-based, data-driven and targeted regulatory frameworks that are informed by our experience and made in consultation with a broad set of stakeholders, including industry, commenters, and relevant Executive Branch agencies. They also demonstrate that there are several approaches to regulatory reform, including identifying and eliminating unnecessary rules, streamlining required rules, and refocusing existing rules to meet technological and market sector changes.

In addition to the foreign ownership streamlining action, here are just a few of the significant reform efforts we have taken over the last four years:

The FCC reached another milestone today in its implementation of Universal Service reforms to ensure rural Americans have access to voice and robust broadband services – including extending broadband to the millions of Americans that are unserved today.

Our primary tool to achieve this goal is the transformation of the former high-cost fund – the program supporting rural voice service – to a Connect America Fund supporting modern networks that provide both broadband and voice service. Phase II implementation is well underway for those areas of the country where 80% of unserved Americans live and key to this transformation is targeting funding efficiently to the areas where it is needed most, outside areas where competitive providers operate. With our last Broadband Progress Report, we posted an online map of broadband service today, including the unserved areas where 19 million Americans live.

Today’s milestone – a Report and Order– is the next step toward adopting a final cost model that will pinpoint as accurately as possible how much support is needed, on a granular (census- block) level, to deliver both voice and broadband, without overspending. The model framework – an “efficient provider framework” – adopted by Commission staff today resolves key assumptions about the design of the network and network engineering, including by:

Parties who have signed the Third Supplemental Protective Order may view the CACM version 3.0 opex input values, along with a more detailed description of how the inputs were calculated and supporting spreadsheets, by accessing the model, visiting the Resources page, and opening the Opex Overview file.

CACM uses publicly-available data where possible for opex input values, supplemented by other sources where there is no readily-available public source of information for opex, to develop baseline opex amounts per month per subscriber line, by company size. Opex input values vary depending on classification of the company size at the holding company level as described in the OCNCoSize input table.

On March 28, in celebration of Women’s History month, the FCC hosted a twitter chat focusing on Women in Information Communications and Technology (ICT). The four panelists come from various sections of ICT: Ann Gallagher, Electronics; Engineer at the FCC; Rachel Payne, Founder & CEO of Fem Inc.; Alyssa Wright, Vice President and Director of Solutions at Open Geo; & Kate Chapman, Executive Director at Humanitarian Open Street Map. The chat highlighted their experiences, expertise, educational backgrounds, and words of wisdom to those interested in ICT.

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The FCC would like to acknowledge and show appreciation to the 166 Twitter users who participated and/or promoted our hour-long discussion through enlightening and original tweets, retweets, and questions. Thank you for helping us reach more than 768,000 people with over 32 million impressions for our WICT chat. This chat was successful due to our panelists, and the active engagement of our followers and chat participants sharing their experiences, offering tips, and asking questions about ICT.

Useful Tips identified in the Twitter chat for Women in ICT:

1. Build your people-network to learn about opportunities, seek a mentor, and find a “champion” to help you climb the professional ladder.

2. Support other women -- pitch in, help out, do something to widen the net of success for all women.

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